Main navigation

Royal Military College

The Royal Military College had about three months to bring their entire website out of the dark ages and into 2015. No one felt up to the challenge; then we came along.

#005F99

Royal Military College

The Royal Military College had three months to bring their entire website out of the dark ages and into 2015.

As RMC started to upgrade to the recent Web Experience Toolkit, they saw an opportunity to convert the entire website onto a new content management system. They chose Drupal as the option to meet their needs. The catch: They had three months.

www.rmcc-cmrc.ca - The Royal Military College had about 6,000 pages that were stored as static HTML files. Each page included two files so the content would be available in either French or English.

Any changes to the format or logos, for instance, had to be applied to each and every file –which is how things worked about 25 years ago. As the College started to upgrade to the recent Web Experience Toolkit, they saw an opportunity to convert the entire website onto a new content management system. They chose Drupal as the option to meet their needs. The catch: They had a three- month time frame to do it. The tight timeline seemed to be too daunting for most firms, but where others saw too great a challenge, OPIN sensed an opportunity.

Goals

Upgrade the web content management system to Drupal 7.

Consolidate existing Drupal 7 websites into single multisite.

Implement latest version of the Web Experience Toolkit (Government of Canada Standard)

Ensure the new website was compliant with WCAG “AA” standards.

Ensure the new website was responsive, addressing the growing smartphone audience.

Ensure the new website met the Government of Canada’s official language requirements (English, French).

Ensure website met the Government of Canada’s standard for metadata.

A Complete Overhaul of the Existing Website

Upgrade the web content management system to Drupal 7

There was a 3 month timeframe to transition the website. OPIN needed to consolidate existing Drupal 7 websites into single multisite. Also, ensuring that the website was backed by the most recent Web Experience Toolkit.

Obviously, the website needed to be easily navigated on smartphones, meet the official language requirements of Canada and meet the GOC standard of metadata.

Learn how OPIN builds digital projects like this one

Solution

OPIN has spent the past several years building and perfecting a series of modules and toolkits to make us more efficient and effective. A project of this scale allowed us to test them all out in perfect sequence and we are extremely proud to note they accomplished what we set out to do. OPIN met the Royal Military College’s seemingly impossible timelines and delivered for them a much more modern and user-friendly website. To make the website more effective and better respond to the needs of its visitors, OPIN conducted user testing to make sure the most requested information was also the easiest to access. Because Drupal was a completely new system, we also trained personnel to be confident and highly effective in using the system and set them up with the skills needed to take control of the new site.

"It was time for RMCC to implement a robust web content management system for the College`s public site that would incorporate the GOC web standards. With OPIN`s expertise and site migration management support, RMCC has now fully functional Drupal site."